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I would place the vertical intermix shaft in the Constellation exactly between the crystals and have a horizontal shaft crossing the vertical one from one crystal to the other.

Regarding the swirling, I don't really understand what you mean by "antimatter being injected into the shaft and reacting back up into the nacelles". Wouldn't "reacting" in that pulsing part make it part of the warp core too?
I always saw those pulsing tubes (also on the TNG era cores) as a kind of particle accelerators, and I see the pulsing part of the TMP shaft as exactly the same.

Regarding Voyager, we saw a ruptured PTC under the central, lighted part of the floor in main engineering between the door and the core in the episode "Investigations". I see that as the main PTC running from the core to the nacelles, also implying that the door would be at the back of the room.

The notion of antimatter power being required for major high-warp level transitions is certainly an increasingly attractive one to me at least.

Eh, the Constellation requires some more thought. The saucer is certainly the easy part to configure.

__________________
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it's not for the timid." - Q

For example, we see in Peak Performance that Hathaway somehow was taken to a remote star system with only a shred of dilithium and no remaining antimatter. She was entirely on fusion power until Boy Genius spiked it with a tiny amount of antimatter (grams of it?) to give her brief warp ability. So perhaps she can't initiate high warp without antimatter, but can sustain it once driven enough to get it to that system.

Eh, the Constellation requires some more thought. The saucer is certainly the easy part to configure.

On your last comparison chart the Constellation has only about three decks in the thick part between the Constitution-style saucer, but she has four window rows and a space as thick as another deck in between them.

For example, we see in Peak Performance that Hathaway somehow was taken to a remote star system with only a shred of dilithium and no remaining antimatter. She was entirely on fusion power until Boy Genius spiked it with a tiny amount of antimatter (grams of it?) to give her brief warp ability. So perhaps she can't initiate high warp without antimatter, but can sustain it once driven enough to get it to that system.

Checked the episode transcript and there's nothing there about her being towed there. The Enterprise does tow her OUT of the system, perhaps to reuse the scene from The Battle. If she was towed there, I'd imagine whatever small ship that did that could probably just have stuck around, maybe serving as an observer or referee. I think maybe it's logical to assume Hathaway either got there under her own power, or close enough to it that there was no one else around for lightyears.

Even if the Hathaway got there under her own power, she could have had dilithium and antimatter (maybe only a little bit of both) and all that, because the crew bringing her there could have taken it along when they left the ship (presumably with a shuttle) and burned the rest of the antimatter off or jettisoned it (maybe not the best idea ^^).
I think there was nobody aboard when Enterprise arrived.

Yeah, or with the power offline there would be no recrystalisation system (I think it was said in one episode that they can do it in the TNG era) to prevent the crystal from decomposing (like in Star Trek 4) into those shards they found later.

On another topic:
Earlier, Praetor mentioned "Nob Akimoto's notion that Excelsior was the first starship with a truss-integrated structural integrity field". Does this mean she was the first ship with SIF per se? I don't understand what truss-integrated means. I'm asking because I always thought especially the Constitution-class should have a structural integrity field because she looks so fragile especially compared to the excelsior, which seems to be so much sturdier with her big neck.

But then again, the Excelsior still has her nacelles mounted on thin spindly pylons, this time with a 90 degree kink in them! Obviously there's some of of super-strong construction material at work here, otherwise the nacelles would drop off every time the power went offline!

@Praetor - When I was building out the interior of the TMP-E I had started at 305m and scaled up only to accommodate the cargo bay and ended up at 355m. The scale might go up a little when I get to the other interior sets.

I do agree that you would have decks at offsets to each other depending on where you are in the ship. The TMP-E had an offset in engineering hull to require a ramp down to the cargo deck. The TOS-E's engineering had the odd-height rooms like engineering, gym, etc. And the S2/3 engineering room had smaller levels that were only 6.5' off the floor. But I think the overall approach to average the deck heights will work for your scaling purposes though.

@Mytran - yeah. I think the SIF on the Excelsiors while new probably was more of a safety feature and the hull, like the Enterprise before her, were pretty sturdy to begin with. Newer ships that followed probably used SIF more as a mass-saving feature to lighten up the ship, IMHO.

On your last comparison chart the Constellation has only about three decks in the thick part between the Constitution-style saucer, but she has four window rows and a space as thick as another deck in between them.

There are four decks, but as you pointed out the window rows point to five. I was toying with the notion of having the middle section have engineering-height decks, but the windows force me to have uniform deck heights throughout.

And, IMO most of the Constellation mysteries have been figured out by MichaelS in his excellent Constellation technical manual thread. I intend to follow his lead on as much as possible.

Regarding the Hathaway, surely she hadn't sat idle at that planet for very long? I would think leaving even old, dilithium and antimatter deprived Starfleet vessels anywhere for long wouldn't be a good idea. I'm sure she probably sat in a surplus yard before being towed there for the exercises. Perhaps other mothballed ships were similarly used.

Egger wrote:

On another topic:
Earlier, Praetor mentioned "Nob Akimoto's notion that Excelsior was the first starship with a truss-integrated structural integrity field". Does this mean she was the first ship with SIF per se? I don't understand what truss-integrated means. I'm asking because I always thought especially the Constitution-class should have a structural integrity field because she looks so fragile especially compared to the excelsior, which seems to be so much sturdier with her big neck.

I would tend to agree with Mytran that the superstrong construction materials would have probably done most of the reinforcement pre-TNG. Maybe there was some sort of more limited field, but the impression I get when looking at TOS vs. TNG is that TNG tends to play a lot more with various structural and subspace fields compared to TOS.

blssdwlf wrote:

@Praetor - When I was building out the interior of the TMP-E I had started at 305m and scaled up only to accommodate the cargo bay and ended up at 355m. The scale might go up a little when I get to the other interior sets.

I do agree that you would have decks at offsets to each other depending on where you are in the ship. The TMP-E had an offset in engineering hull to require a ramp down to the cargo deck. The TOS-E's engineering had the odd-height rooms like engineering, gym, etc. And the S2/3 engineering room had smaller levels that were only 6.5' off the floor. But I think the overall approach to average the deck heights will work for your scaling purposes though.

@Mytran - yeah. I think the SIF on the Excelsiors while new probably was more of a safety feature and the hull, like the Enterprise before her, were pretty sturdy to begin with. Newer ships that followed probably used SIF more as a mass-saving feature to lighten up the ship, IMHO.

Thanks, blssdwlf. I wonder if the SIF gave rise to they type of impulse engine that used subspace fields to help lighten the ship to move them?

Egger wrote:

Maybe also because of the transwarp project, they developed SIF to counteract some new stress factors coming with that engine.

That's a good notion. It's important not to forget how exponential the new warp scale is compared to the old.

__________________
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it's not for the timid." - Q

The big crystal things are described as Inertial Mass Reduction Fields, right? From what I understood of fandom reference material those things stabilized warp fields from the nacelles to make them usable at sublight.